Lucas

Lucas Eberun is a court magician of the Kingdom of Aiwood and one of the realm's strongest mages. His court office earns him the rank of honorary viscount — a station halfway between nobility and commoner: it is not hereditary, comes with no land, and lasts only as long as the family keeps the post. Lucas is only the second generation of this upstart house and clings desperately to its standing.

He fathered Rest by forcing himself on a maid in his service — the hero's mother. The pregnant woman was bought off with a handful of coins and thrown out to raise the boy alone. When Rest turned one, Lucas dragged mother and infant to a temple and forced a mana-measurement rite on them; on hearing the verdict 'no mana', he sneered 'no crop grows from a barren field', tossed a money-pouch on the floor, and walked out.

Lucas only took Rest in years later — after the mother's death, under the law requiring kin to take guardianship of a minor — and even then with deep reluctance. The king was famed for benevolence, and abandoning an orphaned son would hand his court rivals a weapon; so to avoid giving them an opening, Lucas grudgingly let the boy into the house — and lodged him in the stables. Rest received no wages, was fed scraps, and only the secret kindness of old servants who remembered his mother kept him from starving.

Cold, vain and obsessed with bloodline, Lucas despises commoners and feels no duty toward the son he discarded. He pinned everything on his legitimate heir Cedric, spoiling him and calling him a genius — for if Cedric became the third consecutive court magician, the family would at last win the hereditary viscount title. When Cedric failed the academy entrance exam spectacularly, Lucas struck his son for the first time in his life and, raging, considered adopting another child instead.

Cedric's downfall collapses the whole scheme: without the office, honorary viscount Eberun is doomed to revert to commoner status. Years later Lucas crosses paths with Rest again — now Count Clover and son-in-law to the chief court mage — at the frontier-development camp, where Lucas has been demoted to a lowly assistant. Pale with fear of revenge, he grovels before the son he once tormented and hauls his baggage like a servant. His comeuppance arrives not as thunder, but as humiliation.

Blood means nothing to Lucas. He refuses to acknowledge Rest as his son, forbids the boy even to call himself his child, and accepts no responsibility for him. When Rest's mother was dying of an illness that healing magic could not touch, Lucas flatly refused a plea for medicine money relayed through an acquainted maid.

The cruelty in the house was not his alone: the persecution of Rest was driven by Lucas's wife Lisa, who hated 'the home-wrecker's child', and his legitimate son Cedric, who made his half-brother a living target for his spells. Lucas simply looked the other way, regarding the bastard as a worthless thing beneath his notice.

All of Lucas's pride rested on a single calculation: Cedric would become a court magician and House Eberun would win the hereditary viscount title. That calculation collapsed when Cedric failed the entrance exam. Without a fresh office, the honorary viscount loses his rank and reverts to commoner — meaning the house is doomed to decline.

By the time he meets Rest again, Lucas has grown gaunt and grey with fear. Exiled as a lowly assistant to the development of the former demon realm, he must bow to his son the count and haul his baggage. Even the legendary court mage Maitis openly mocks him as 'a doomed little honorary viscount'. Lucas's reckoning arrives quietly, and without hope.